The recent widespread use of composite materials for aircraft structure has resulted in a heightened interest in reducing manufacturing costs while maintaining production quality and, consequently, performance standards. Typically, production of composite materials is a labor-intensive endeavor, resulting in extremely high production costs in terms of time and money.
For example, one prior art method for producing composite materials requires manual marking of a partially laid up composite using a cloth locating template (CLT) to indicate the positioning and orientation of the next ply which is to be placed. After the ply is placed, the cloth locating template must be replaced to ensure that the ply has been accurately laid. This method requires a large labor investment, resulting in large manufacturing costs of time and money.
Still other methods for producing composite materials rely upon automated placement of the three-inch wide graphite tape using automated tape-laying machinery. While this method greatly reduces the labor costs of producing the composite structures, the average time investment has proven to be unacceptable for various composite part designs.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a method for producing composite structures which requires minimum labor and money investments. It is also desirable to provide a method which minimizes the necessary labor and money investment while also minimizing the production time required to produce the composite structure. As always, it is desirable to provide such a method which results in composite structures that meet necessary performance specifications.